Three years after the covid pandemic broke out, wuhanthe city in central China where the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus began to be transmitted, has turned the page and its residents do not even want to remember the long confinement they suffered or that the name of the town is associated with the pathogen.
wuhan It was the first city in the world to undergo a lockdown that lasted more than three months at a time when little was known about the extent of the virus and only just learned that it could be transmitted between humans.
Its residents remember the chaos of the first days of January 2020, in which the virus began to wreak havoc, although it is in November 2019 when many epidemiologists and virologists believe that it began to circulate through the city.
Beijing maintains that the first confirmed case was a man who fell ill on December 1, but it was not until January 23 that Wuhan -the ninth most populous city in China and one of the largest commercial, industrial and educational centers in the part central part of the country – was isolated and paralyzed until further notice, causing the anguish and fear of many of its residents.
You couldn’t go in or out of the house, and no one had enough food because it was impossible to predict how long we would be without going out. Nothing was known about the virus, nor how many patients there were, nor what symptoms it caused exactly, nor how many beds would be available. The fear was also that information was hidden from us. It was very difficult at first.”
reminds EFE the resident Chu Jing.
The city managed to reverse the situation thanks to the strong prevention measures implemented, the express construction of hospitals or the help of volunteers, transporters and delivery men who distributed medical supplies, brought food to residential complexes or took patients to hospitals.
Most people have already turned the page on what happened three years ago. Nobody wants to remember it. Above all, we do not want Wuhan to be associated with the virus. It started here but it could have been anywhere else.”
Chu adds.
From ‘zero COVID’ to living with the virus
China went from minimizing the impact of the disease to betting on a strong policy to avoid it, the ‘zero covid’, which meant locking its borders from March 2020 until last January 8 to prevent the “import” of cases from abroad.
In addition, officials faced the difficult task of preventing outbreaks, but also not putting in place “excessive restrictions” that would paralyze the economy.
“With omicron, this was getting more and more difficult. The strategy might make sense in 2020 or 2021, because while the virus was still causing deaths in the rest of the world, we were able to lead a relatively normal life here,” Chu says.
The problem is that omicron is almost impossible to control and the restrictions were becoming more and more draconian. They dismantled everything that that policy entailed from one day to the next, but I wouldn’t say it was entirely unexpected. After the protests, and taking into account the economic situation that the country is going through, it was to be expected that this would happen sooner or later.”
points.
“There was no intermediate point, it was either ‘zero covid’ or open your hand. But it was surprising that it happened so suddenly ”, she concludes.
And it is that the accumulated discontent unleashed protests at the end of November of last year in various parts of the country, before which the Government bet, almost from one day to the next, for a more lax management of the covid and the opening of borders.
The official propaganda and the country’s officials justified the shift by assuring that there are now “effective drugs for diagnosis and treatment” or that “more than 90% of the population is already vaccinated.”
But despite the tsunami of infections and scenes of high-pressure hospitals in some Chinese cities after abandoning politics, authorities have reported just 60,000 deaths in medical centers from the disease.
“Have the figures ever been real?” asks the resident when asked if she trusts the official data offered by the institutions during these three years.
wuhanToday, like other large Chinese cities, it is heading towards a new normality, that of living with the virus, although the challenge for the Asian giant is now to deal with the spread of the covid in rural areas during the holidays for the Lunar New Year, that fall between January 21 and 27.
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